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Low-functioning pinhead...
February 28, 2003
Smells Like a Fish 'n Chips Shop
This story broke a while back, but I never did get around to posting on it.
There’s always been a lot of talk about alternative fuels (Hydrogen-powered cars, Mr. President? Gimme a break!). But, aside from some pork-barrel (ethanol) subsidies for agri-business, not a whole lot of action.
Over in Britain, however, where taxes make fuel much more expensive than here, people have been taking matters into their own hands. Turns out that slightly-modified vegetable oil works as well as diesel, produces fewer emissions and — instead of that stinky diesel smell — has a pleasant, hunger-inducing aroma.
According to the Manchester Guardian, the authorities are none too pleased. But it’s all perfectly legal, provided you pay your taxes.
February 26, 2003
Creative Confusion
MovableType 2.6.x added a CreativeCommons Licence module (off by default, but all too easily turned on). This has touched off a bit of a brouhaha, as various prominent bloggers grapple with the implications of turning it on.
A very good legal analysis of these implications is helpful.
Personally, I thought that the CC licence I chose for this blog closely mirrors the prevailing ethic in the scientific community. I’m happy with that choice, and I know that I will surely have to live with it.
February 24, 2003
Turning on Fluxes and Gauged Supergravity
Previously, I asked whether there was any relation between the de Sitter solutions of compactified string theory with fluxes (and branes) and the explicit gauged supergravity solutions of Trigiante et al.
One good clue about how to go about understanding the connection (if there is one) is the recent paper of Andrianopoli et al. They show explicitly the connection between string compactifications with fluxes and effective gauged supergravity theories.
Perhaps that’s not totally surprising. After all both achieve a reduction in the number of moduli. But, in the former case, I’m used to thinking about this in terms of a flux-induced superpotential. The lifting of the flat directions in gauged supergravity also involves the Higgs mechanism. So the connection between the two approaches is less than obvious (at least to me).
Of course, Andrianopoli et al only discuss abelian gaugings, whereas Trigiante et al need a particular noncompact nonabelian gauging. And, on the string side, Kachru et al have a space-filling anti-D3 brane. So the connection is still a little obscure…
February 23, 2003
Comments
The really cool people have, not just an RSS feed for their blog entries, but also a feed of recently-posted comments. That way, if you’re following the discussion of some particular entry, you don’t have to check back to see if new comments have been posted.
Not wishing to seem uncool, I added a Comments Feed to this blog.
Of course, some people think they’re even cooler by having a separate RSS Comment Feed for each individual blog entry. That’s extremely tedious to deal with from a reader’s point of view. To make it bearable, NewsAggregators could give the option of automatically unsubscribing feeds that have not been updated in a while, and provide some sort of collapsible nested list of subscriptions (to deal with the sudden proliferation of subscriptions to similarly-named feeds).
With present technology, I’d have to have an order of magnitude or two more comment traffic on this blog to make individual comment feeds worth the extra trouble.
No, what really would be cool are Threaded Comments. But I think I’ll wait till Phil Ringalda does it to his blog.
Update: Dang!
February 22, 2003
Keynote and EquationService
At $14.95, it was hard to pass up the Keynote+iLife bundle from Apple. Which means that I’ve gotten to spend a bit of time playing around with Keynote.
After the initial amusement of watching bullet points bounce and twirl and slide across the screen as they appeared and disappeared from my slides, I got down to the serious business.
How to do equations? The obvious answer is EquationService. It’s best known as a providing a “send text, return PDF” service. For those Applications which accept such services (Mail, TextEdit), you can highlight a block of tex code, hit ⌘+\ and EquationService will run it through pdftex and return a PDF fragment in its place.
Keynote, alas, is not such an application. Fortunately, EquationServices can also function as a handy-dandy standalone equation editor.